>Why isn’t your WIND scenario more widely appreciated and/or accepted by institutional guys or other analysts?
"Embedded Systems of the Complicated Kind i.e. one involving a RTOS" is a slowly developing story when measured against the momentum displayed by other technology breakthroughs. IOMEGA develops the ZIP drive with an immediate market that is huge by any standard and its stock takes off. Systemsoft brilliantly devises System Wizard which anyone who has ever touched a computer can appreciate in its entirety. It’s stock was bouncing between $10 and $18 based on a not-understandable core business that was growing 50% annually, but recently sky-rockets $15 in one day on the understandable excitement surrounding System Wizard. Geoworks, with little revenues has a cute operating system that makes a phone smart and appealing, and it gets priced like a biotech stock.
I have explained the nature of RTOS’s to semi-technical people many times, but never without their eyes glazing over. Most people that have been told all about "Embedded Systems involving a RTOS" as distinguished from the mountains of embedded systems they already use, don’t appreciate what it means. Most technical people that do understand, and maybe even use RTOS’s, don’t realize the synergy that obtains not from a bunch of smart objects, but from smart objects that can communicate around the world with billions of other smart objects.
Similarly, the makings of the internet went unnoticed from the late sixties until about 1995. One speaker at the H&Q Technology Show this Spring claimed fame because he pointed out the coming importance of the Internet to a skeptical audience in 1995 - before Netscape! By 1996, the Internet was the main theme of the show, to the extent that the last two days were exclusively Internet companies.
Embedded Systems of the Complicated Kind will be noticed when a giant like Microsoft buys one of the companies, or when something big like I2O cannot be ignored. It will not be noticed because it is a dominate component of any visionary look at the future of the computing industry. Vision is IBM buying Lotus for $3.5 billion to obtain Notes.
Fortunately, it is not important for anybody to fully appreciate the future in order for these companies to enjoy increasing sales and profits today. We get to invest in them based on conservative earnings estimates, expecting to reap huge rewards for our vision in the near future.
All these are reasons, not excuses, for the analysts not projecting the kinds of numbers I posted the other day. Although, as I indicated, if I were an analyst, I would consider it too risky to try to present estimates of the size I posted. The safe approach is to extend current trends, being prepared to up the estimates once the company starts to produce positive earnings surprises. Recall that I predicted they would be increasing their estimates for WIND, which they have already started doing.
Allen, |
